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In 2005, Marina Nemat worked at the local Swiss Chalet, a short drive from her Aurora home, cared for her two boys, and had a hot meal on the table every night by the time her electrical engineer husband got home.

Stored in the bedroom upstairs was her 78,000-word life story, filled with secrets even her family didn't know, and ones traditional Iranian families are often loath to speak of.

Nemat was a teenage political prisoner in Iran's notorious Evin jail – the same facility where Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured and died in 2003. During her incarceration, Nemat was tortured, sentenced to death, and forced to convert to Islam and marry a guard. She was released only through the kindness and influence of the guard's family following his death.

Two years ago, a Sunday Star story about her life launched the whirlwind journey that has made her who she is now – the published author of the memoir Prisoner of Tehran (Penguin), released this month and soon to be translated into 13 languages and sold in 16 countries.

Nemat, 42, no longer works at Swiss Chalet. Most days she's employed as a researcher and translator for the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. And she is about to embark on an international book tour.

"At first it was a very selfish desire," she says of writing her autobiography. The petite Nemat chats while cradling a cup of mint tea in a downtown Toronto café. "I was going to do this book. I just couldn't live with myself anymore."

But what began as a therapeutic diary became a mission to tell the story of Iran's past, in the hopes of helping the future. Nemat believes there has never been a more important time for Iran's diaspora (according to Statistics Canada, there are more than 70,000 Iranian-born people living here) to speak up and explain the complexities of the country.

"The people don't want to dig up that dirty past and let ugly secrets out," she says. "It was exactly the same reaction my own family had after I was released – sit around the dinner table and talk about the weather. Good people talk about the weather. Bad people talk about politics."

Nemat was born in downtown Tehran in 1965, just months after Iranian Premier Hassan Al Mansur was assassinated by reputed followers of Shiite leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

Khomeini's push for a theocracy, coupled with the general unrest over the repressive regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi, eventually pushed the Shah into exile in 1979.

By then Nemat was a feisty teenager and devout Catholic, even though her parents were not particularly religious. Her father taught dance, a profession he'd later have to give up due to Islamic laws, and her mother was a hairdresser who disapproved of her daughter's rebellious spirit. On Jan.15, 1982, at the age of 16, Marina was imprisoned alongside many of her classmates, and two years, two months and 12 days elapsed before she was finally free again.

Her book details that painful period inside Evin's walls, including her forced marriage to a guard named Ali Moosavi, who was later assassinated near his family's home. After her release – and a forbidden marriage in a Catholic church to her teenage sweetheart, Andre Nemat – she fled to Canada.

Nemat says that once she decided to write her life story, she couldn't stop, and would often spend hours writing with tears streaming down her cheeks. "It became like an obsession to tell the tale," observes her friend Flavia Silano, recalling the time when Nemat would write through the night.

Silano was part of a close-knit book club with Nemat and, like others in the group, she knew little of her friend's past in Iran.

"The first time Marina gave me the manuscript, it just blew me away. I couldn't put it down."

With Nemat's homeland in the news as the U.S. leads an international effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and following the recent kidnapping of British sailors, Nemat says the timing of her book has thrust her into the spotlight as an Iranian commentator. And she doesn't shy away from the politics.

"You cannot give democracy – we've seen that in Iraq," she says. "Iranians feel now that they have to choose between the U.S. invasion and the Islamic Republic.

"So now they're really torn, even though the majority of Iranians, they don't want the dictatorship of the Islamic Republic. But they really don't think they have any other choice because they don't want to fall into the arms of the U.S."

If the regime is ever to change – giving Nemat that chance to revisit the country she left more than 20 years ago – she believes the push has to come from inside.

"I don't think Iranians are ready for democracy. But when they are ready, we're going to know."

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